June 16th, 2010
In 2008 we had an opportunity to work on a interesting project with the creator of the Moonjoos line of vodka jellos.
Aidan wanted to create an experience site where the legend of the brand could be developed. So working with our friends Digitalus we set to and devised a world on the dark side of the moon where men were tempted by beautiful maidens on earth, kidnapped and then set to work as slaves of the Moonjoos Corporation, mining, distilling and packaging the famous Moonjoos brand of vodka jellies.
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May 3rd, 2010
Facebook is getting saturated with various apps, the majority either mindless variants of farm, pet or city growing, or tiresome surveys/quizzes.
That’s why we jumped at the opportunity to create an application that can have impact in the real world. ”Giving Nature a Voice” is a Facebook based multi-petition application for Forest & Bird New Zealand. Their first petition was to encourage people to speak up and help prevent more mining of our conservation areas:
There are existing Facebook petition apps about (eg; Causes), but they are all bloated with unnecessary extra features and weren’t able to be branded as tightly as Forest and Bird required. A custom solution was the best course forward, not only as we could design as we saw fit, but so we could learn what makes Facebook apps tick.
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March 10th, 2010
With another successful Americarna event done and dusted we thought it a good opportunity to look back on one of the more interesting campaigns that we’ve been involved with - the Miss Americarna 2008 competition.
At the inaugural event a year earlier the organisers had simply handpicked a girl to appear as the public face of the event, in 2008 they wanted to encourage more participation both from the applicants and the public. A competition presented a great way to achieve this and also raise awareness of the event 6 months out so it was decided to advertise for contestants and then allow the public to vote using the website and SMS based texting. Proceeds from the texts would go to the SPCA.
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February 8th, 2010
We always enjoy the inevitable challenges that occur when creating media to display on unusual screens or surfaces. So when one of our international clients who had just undergone a rebrand asked us to repurpose video asset for use on the eight story high NASDAQ Marketsite Tower in New Yorks Times Square we jumped at the opportunity.
The screen measures 1,000 square metres and uses more than 18 million LEDs on a display with a top resolution of 1280×1824. Compare that with the TSB Bank 40 square metre screen that we built and operated and you get a idea of the sheer size of the sign. As you can see from the short video above, not only is the aspect ratio quite unique but we also had to plan for the windows which this massive digital sign is built around.
Fortunately its less of an issue than you’d think, as NASDAQ provides After Effect templates which help to provide a guide. Since we had originated the initial video in 720P it was quite easy to conform to the aspect ratio without losing detail. It was pretty cool to be able to watch the result via live webcam and see our work displayed in real time on the other side of the world.
The video was shot on XDCAM EX using the Letus Ultimate and Nikon 35mm lenses, actors were filmed in downtown Wellington, at Kaitoke Regional Park and on a greenscreen in our studio. The asset was taken from the brand video that we initially worked on. Nicci Lock from Film Wellington was a great help with securing location permissions.
January 5th, 2010
Here’s something we ain’t blogged about yet: the portal of Taranaki, the beautiful region where Momentum was born. It’s a site-system that began as an effort to unify a family of websites that dealt with different aspects of life in Taranaki, like tourism, film, business, governance, etc. This was three years ago. Today’s Taranaki - Like No Other website has evolved considerably, and, like all good sites, that process is ongoing.
Allow me to guide you through some of the cool techniques we pulled designing this site.
The menu
The first challenge we had, was of course how to structure, and easily navigate such huge amounts of diverse data. Beyond the main areas (top-right) we still had enormous branches of information.
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January 5th, 2010
Momentum enjoyed the opportunity to redevelop the McDonald Real Estate site (http://www.eieio.co.nz/) from the ground up.
A real estate site is a great technical challenge - hundreds of listings and thousands of photos changing daily, as well as complex searches and regular content changes.
We decided to use a free, open source CMS called Silverstripe.
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August 13th, 2009
I was fortunate enough to attend the first Wordpress Wordcamp NZ last weekend.
It was an energised, fun packed weekend with speakers and participants from a diverse range of backgrounds - lawyers, teachers, journalists, authors, designers, developers and geeks. All were passionate about their blog/CMS of choice - Wordpress.
Having rarely blogged or used Wordpress before, I was shown its power, flexibility and the huge range of plugins available. As a developer, its important for me to get under the hood, so I will be spending some time with digital wrench in hand.
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July 5th, 2009
Hi, just a post to introduce myself, I’m Daniel Pickering, and I’m the latest addition to the Momentum Studios crew. I’m a web developer, and very excited to be working with such a talented and diverse team. I’m proud to call myself a geek, and love playing around with the latest technologies. I’ve recently delved into Linux, and have been using Ubuntu as the main OS on my laptop.
I’ve just discovered Xenocode (http://xenocode.com) , a sexy application virtualization system that allows you to launch Windows applications direct from the web with no installation (apart from a one time plugin).
As an excellent and useful example, they have a browser sandbox that allows you to launch any of the main market share browsers. Once they’re downloaded and cached, they start up very quickly.
This means you can run IE6, IE7 and IE8 all at the same time - great for testing.
As a geeky bonus, look in C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR PROFILE\Local Settings\Application Data\Spoon\Cache
Each folder contains the cached version of the app that you can launch directly, eg; ie6.exe, ie7.exe (ensure you’ve cached it correctly by launching it from the web at least once)
